Depression

WARNING!

This post contains no humour, joy or happiness. It is a rundown of the symptoms of my personal depression. It does not have a happy ending or any of the coping mechanisms I have developed, those will be in another post.


So often when people try to describe depression, it's causes, feeling and effects, they fall back on metaphor and poetic language to help those who don't have it understand. I find it had to commit to a metaphor unless it's exactly right, and so I go round and round in my head in circles torturing myself until all words blend together into a gray mush and I just sit staring at a wall. Also I think using flowery language is something many sufferers use to try not to upset or scare off those who they're talking to.

My depression almost always starts on a morning. I wake up and immediately alarm bells go off. My blood feels cold, especially in my chest and arms. The arms and fingers are especially cold. My heartbeat is a little faster and very strong, beating much harder than usual feeling like it's thumping into my ribs and reverberating through my whole body. My skin feels dry all over and tight like it's been stretched, rubbing against itself feels like sandpaper. If things are especially bad my whole body will start to shake, like I'm freezing cold and my arms and fingers go numb.

The above, many of you may recognize as symptomatic of a panic attack. I used to have full blown panic attacks that would end in passing out or vomiting. Over the past 5 years I've learned strategies for recognizing the onset of an attack and the physical and mental techniques to get a handle on and sometimes straight up beat them back. These techniques are less effective when you wake up in the middle of one.

The next thing that happens is my thoughts become very bleak. I start to think about the past and the future and life in general. I think about all my past mistakes and regrets and all of the time I wasted. This makes me feel awful about the present, where I'm a 25 year old virgin who lives at home, has no social life and no job. I think about the positive things in my life but they all seem so small and insignificant. I start to over think everything and see everything as pointless, at it's worst point this became a constant voice in my head, explaining everything I'm doing as I do it and telling me how pointless or unimportant it is.

What's hard is the familiarity of all this. I feel like this is the default way of being, that no matter how long I haven't been in a pit of depression and have been able to function, that was all an illusion. I simply forgot how shitty everything really is; Even if I forget again it will only be a matter of time before I remember, and no matter what I have managed to achieve, however much I enjoyed it or was proud of it, will all eventually seem for nothing. This is the scary part, thinking about the past makes me feel regret, the present guilt, and the future a paralyzing fear.

This all happen just after I've woken up. My defenses are low and I already feel weak and tired so I go back to sleep. Even if I've just woken from the darkest dream it's never as terrifying as what my conscious mind is currently doing to me. Whenever I do get up, if I start to feel better the dilemma flips and I become afraid of going back to sleep. I know that if I do I'll wake up feeling awful again. So my sleep pattern becomes completely bizarre. I lay awake in bed listening to music or radio programs trying not to think and to relax but in the back of my head I know I'm avoiding sleep. Because of this I tend to sleep through the day and wake in the afternoon or evening, which results in me waking up and having nothing to do, walking around an empty house at night with nothing but the internet and TV to distract me.